Hackers With Wall Street Savvy Stealing M&A Data
December 1st, 2014Via: Bloomberg:
Hackers with Wall Street expertise have stolen merger-and-acquisition information from more than 80 companies for more than a year, according to security consultants who shared their findings with law enforcement.
A group dubbed FIN4 by researchers at FireEye Inc. (FEYE) has been tricking executives, lawyers and consultants into providing access to confidential data and communications, and probably using the information for insider trading, FireEye said in a report today. The hackers’ sophistication suggests they’ve worked in the financial sector, Jen Weedon, FireEye’s manager of threat intelligence, said in an interview.
The report is the most detailed to date suggesting that hacking may be the basis for a new wave of insider trading, following a crackdown by U.S. prosecutors over the last three years that focused on mining information through personal connections and payoffs. FireEye said it couldn’t discount that the hackers provided the data to traders or a hedge fund.
“We suspect they are Americans, given their Wall Street inside knowledge,” Weedon said. “They seem to have worked on Wall Street.”
